Democracy Is So 2005

As Donald Trump has swept through the primaries toward the Republican nomination, his blowtorch style has led some commentators to call him a modern version of Benito Mussolini who’s bringing dangerous 1930s-style politics to America. In reality, Trump’s rise doesn’t signal a return of fascism, and his political style doesn’t parallel that of Mussolini. Instead, Trump is part of a modern-day democratic retreat that’s been going on for a decade in the developing world and which is making its way to America and Western Europe. The environment that’s made Trump’s rise possible has more in common with Thailand in 2000 and Turkey in 2010 than Italy—or Germany—in 1933, and Trump’s political approach is closer to those of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russian President Vladimir Putin, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, or former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

From the early 1970s, when much of southern Europe democratized, to the mid-2000s, democracy seemed to be sweeping the globe. From 1990 to 2005, electoral democracies worldwide expanded by almost 50 percent. Yet according to Freedom House, a nonprofit that monitors the state of democracy, the number of countries with declining freedoms grew in 2015 for the 10th year in a row, the longest streak of democratic regression in five decades. What’s more, in its annual report Freedom House noted that in 2015 “the number of countries showing an [annual] decline in freedom was the largest since the 10-year slide began.”